Protecting Equipment from ESD Damage


Do you and how do you protect your equipment from Electrostatic Discharge (ESD) damage? Have you damaged any equipment from ESD? Seen a few posts on protecting from power surge and dips, but nothing on protecting from our own ESD. This past winter in the normally humid NW we had some dry low humidity days and walking across the carpet to equipment can generate a significant charge. I had an incident where I touched my rack and it resulted in D/A going berserk resulting in fried ribbons in tweeters and amplifier fuse being taken out. My heart skipped a beat when I turned on my Simaudio Moon W-7 amp and nothing happened. Fortunate it was just the fuse. If you can feel the discharge that is between 2 and 3 thousand volts and on this day it was a strong discharge, likely lifting the entire ground plane, causing the PS Audio Perfectwave DAC to go nuclear (output noise full voltage provided at output). I since put a wire to a plate (copper terminal) that goes through 30M ohm of resistance to ground on my equipment rack. I touch the plate first before touching equipment. The 30M ohms of resistance limits the current so discharge is stretched out in time. So far so good, have not had any repeats of incident, and I don’t feel the shock. Have not heard this topic discussed, did not see a commercial solution other then putting an ESD strap on or touching one, which would look funky on rack and is impractical. So how do you deal with ESD and have you had equipment damaged from?

georgeab

Showing 2 responses by erik_squires

Um, guys, no, ESD discharge and potential damage is real.  The amount of exposure to this damage varies from each piece of kit.

If your gear suddenly changes behavior when you touch it you could eventually damage it.  In the case of my DAC the problem was most likely due to the metal control knob, or the entire DAC really, not being grounded.  Since I'm using an external 12V supply the ground on the IEC the only path to ground from my DAC's case is through the signal cable.

I think a lot of you have gotten spoiled, ESD damage to ICs is a lot better now, in part due to better manufacturing of the ICs themselves.

Honestly my solution to this has been to use a remote all the time. 🤣 Having a discharge point is a good idea, but since you are not actually energized, 10k-30K is probably just fine as a resistance to ground.  I might suggest otherwise if you were actually working on the guts of equipment which was energized by wall AC.